Mala Burt, who writes with Laura Ambler, blogs about inspiration in writing, gardening, food, and life in St. Michaels – the prettiest town on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Main menu

Post navigation

Six on Saturday – Where There’s a Will… – October 13, 2018

It is 55 degrees outside this morning and the furnace is running. Just a couple of dasy ago it was in the mid 80’s. I think fall is finally here although we are still waiting for the trees to show color.

Today there are five photos from my garden and one from Friday’s tour of a nearby commercial cucumber farm.

I thought we would have to hire a crew of studly men to move the Jan Kirsh avocado sculpture, but my husband and I accomplished the feat in forty-five minutes with a mover’s dolly. I had been watching the track of Hurricane Michael and knew that if we got significant rain it would be weeks or months until we had an opportunity to move this heavy concrete sculpture. When it was installed the artist brought a crew of three men. Kirsh now makes these avocados out of resin so they are not so heavy. On the left, still wrapped for winter is the avocado sitting in the mud last May. On the right is the new location.

We’d originally installed it in the garden with the best view from the deck. But that is the garden that is increasingly full of water after heavy rains. And eight years later the sculpture had subsided and the red twig dogwood I planted as a backdrop had encroached. It needed to be moved.

I thought I knew where I wanted it to go, but after removing the river birch several weeks ago that open spot seemed perfect. It is a little higher and doesn’t stay soggy. The spot was thirty feet from where the sculpture had been placed and I was resigned to paying a crew to move it.

However, my mind is always in problem solving mode. I realized if we could get the avocado off the base and on to a mover’s dolly we might be able to pull it across the lawn. And on Tuesday morning we had a window. We’d had no rain for a week. The main piece of sculpture was gently rocked off the base onto a bag of unopened potting soil. We didn’t want to break it. We then moved the base and the large piece of bluestone the sculpture sat on to the new location. The avocado was trickier since it had one end that was heavier than the other. We padded the dolly, and levered the avocado on. My husband pulled and I steadied. And we were able to reasemble it in the new location. Yay for septuagenarians!

2. The heavy rains on Thursday night, the remnants of Hurricane Michael, filled the avocado. Before we have freezing temperatures I’ll need to empty it and wrap it for winter. The rain and wind brought down alot of branches from the silver maples. Lawn clean-up is in my future.

3. I went out on Wednesday to take some photos before the predicted rain and saw at least six Monarch butterflies. They liked the remaining zinnias.

4. Monarchs liked the tall asters, too.

5. A post-it note on a kitchen cupboard had been reminding me of a garden task. I wanted to put some small ferns in the area where the Naked Lady lilies come up so I would remember where they are. I’d flagged the area when the foliage died down and finally got the ferns planted. I managed to damage some bulbs in the process. Oh, well. I don’t know where these ferns came from but they handle quite a bit of sun, don’t get too tall, but spread nicely.

6. On Friday I traveled with a garden group to see a local cucumber farming operation which has two enormous greenhouses where they grow seedless English cucumbers. The flowers don’t need to be fertilized to produce fruit. The greenhouses were previously used to grow cut flowers but when the recession hit, people stopped buying cut flowers and the farmers had to find a new crop. These long cukes have very fragile skin and must be hand picked as do the grapes on another part of this farm. Commercial farming is hard work and expensive. This greenhouse is on a farm which has been in the same family for five generations.

Original avocado sculpture that will please birds I’m sure ! I hope concrete is well polished to avoid green moss in winter. (PS: pretty pictures of Monarch … if only I could see one in Europe other than in captivity … not for today …)

The top is polished but the cavity has striations on it which makes it difficult to clean. I have to use bleach and a heavy duty brush. There is not drain so it is not an easy thing to maintain. I think this design was tweaked by the artist as she found out the flaws in the original.

You can apply a varnish for concrete walls inside the structure, like the ones we could paint on the interior walls our houses for decorative effect: ecological ?? otherwise the best is “elbow grease” if you know this expression

So here am I, in England, growing English cucumbers and thinking they were just cucumbers. It’s odd, the things you don’t know. I have a very old skateboard hanging in the shed that does service for moving things like your sculpture. Railway sleepers and washing machine come to mind.

We pay dearly for those long English cukes, Jim.
Our children had skateboards but they are long gone. And we are really getting too old to do this sort of moving, but I must say I was quite proud of the accomplishment.

I was interested to learn how fragile the skins are. These are the cukes we buy wrapped in plastic. At this farm that was originally done by hand before they got a machine to help with the process. And these are seedless since they don’t need bees to fertilize the blooms. Seed is bought from the Netherlands.

I love sculpture in the garden, and your avocado is a beauty! The Monarchs are amazing, I would love to see one. Glad to see the zinnias and asters are still doing their thing, and so I am sure are the butterflies.

Zinnias and asters are still going with all that weather? Would you believe that I have never grown zinnias? My colleagues grow them at work. I just never got around to trying them. There are many asters that I have not grown either. The few that I grew just happened to be in tow of my gardens when I got there. One comes back annually, and is there right now, although it is not much to look at.